We all assume it does. We may be wrong in that assumption, but nonetheless we go about our lives assuming that they have purpose, meaning, and rationale. We act as though we knew there is a good reason why we exist. I believe this is true even of those who explicitly deny that life has a purpose.
The simplest way to reveal the universal assumption of purposeful life is to point out that we all believe that murder is wrong. Everyone in every culture thinks that it is a sin to murder. Except for psychopaths – and even they tend to put up a fuss when you murder them. Now when I say “murder” I am not referring to euthanasia, mercy-killing, abortion, capital punishment, self-defense or warfare. For the sake of argument, let us put those aside and limit ourselves to clear cases of cold-blooded murder. If life is truly pointless, what’s wrong with taking it? Why punish murderers? Whether we admit it or not, we know that life is not pointless. There is a reason for it. There is a purpose to it. That is why you can’t just take it from somebody.
A second indication that we all regard life as purposeful is more subtle. I will summarize it this way. Even those who hold with great conviction that life has no intrinsic purpose inevitably strive to make up a purpose for it, as though they know in their hearts that they have a created a vacuum that has to be filled; they have opened a gap that was not there before that somehow must be closed.
This striving to create meaning in a meaningless world, or purpose in a purposeless existence, is the cornerstone of a philosophy known as existentialism. When I was young, I was force-fed existentialist literature till I had it coming out my ears. Here is one way to summarize existentialist thought: “Life has no purpose. Therefore, you must create your own purpose.” I will give you an example of this kind of reasoning from the late Harvard professor of Paleontology Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote:
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer — but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.
It seems to me that in that quote – and there are countless like it – Stephen Jay Gould has teed it up for us. He has constructed an argument that cries out for a response like the following: "Wait a minute. If life is an accident, if it just happens to be here, and there is no higher purpose governing it – no 'higher answer,' just a crazy bouncing of the lottery balls of history in the quantum fields of chance – and it could have turned out differently, but it didn’t, and here we are - and if we cannot discover the meaning of life because it is not there waiting for us to discover it, then, I ask, why construct an answer ourselves? Gould says we have to do it. He says, “We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.”
I cannot for the life of me understand why then we need to construct any answer at all. Much less, as Gould says, construct it from “our own wisdom and ethical sense.” Where did that “wisdom and ethical sense” come from? Gould would have no answer to that, except to repeat, “Well, it comes from...where everything else comes from! It comes from a certain kind of fish fin. And an asteroid that knocked out the dinosaurs by sheer luck and enabled small mammals to survive, one of which became us. And then for millions of generations, the strong ate the weak.” If that is where my ethical sense comes from, then I suppose it must be ok for the strong to eat the weak. It must be ok for the powerful to oppress the inept and unfit to the point of devouring them. If the weak have no intrinsic purpose, because nothing has intrinsic purpose, then there is nothing to prevent me from declaring that their purpose is to provide me with calories, metaphorical or otherwise.
We all know that life has purpose – ready-made, intrinsic purpose that must not be violated for the sake of the pleasure and well-being of the strong. That truth is so deeply settled in us that if our philosophy denies that life comes pre-installed with a purpose, we rush to supply one ourselves in no time flat. We do this, it seems to me, without batting an eye, without pausing to reflect why we feel so moved to supply that missing purpose. It is like a man amputating one of his legs and then immediately getting himself a set of crutches or building a prosthetic replacement leg. If you ask him why he is doing that, he gives you a puzzled look and says, “Well I still have to get from point A to point B don’t I?” To which I would say, “Yes. I think that is what your now-severed leg was there for in the first place.”
I believe that the thing that really causes people to question whether they have a purpose in life is not their philosophy - which can be shockingly, even comically malleable and inconsistent - but rather, their experience. By experience I simply mean circumstances that hit them in the face and that cannot be eluded or batted away with self-contradicting rationalizations.
One of the experiences that causes people to question purpose is the loss of everything they thought they were living for. This happens to many poor, unfortunate souls. They suffer a tragedy that completely turns their life upside down, and they ask why they exist. The prototypical example in the Bible is Job. Job is presented to us as a man who had everything: wealth, family, good health, and a sterling reputation. Moreover, his good fortunate somehow did not corrupt him – we are told he was good, honorable, and generous. And then everything he had or worked for vanished. A series of tragedies wiped out his finances. His 10 children were killed in a tornado. He developed painful blisters all over his body. And his friends turned on him. They said, “You must have deserved it – you must be hiding something from us. It’s a good thing you got knocked off your pedestal.” And part of Job’s response to the loss of everything including his reputation was to say, “Why was I born? What is the point of my existence?”
He even expressed the wish to go back in time to the moment of his birth and erase it so that he could be non-existent. He said, “Why didn’t I die at birth? Why couldn’t I have been stillborn?” Then he generalized from his experience and applied it to all miserable people: “Why is light given to those in misery?” he asked. “Why is life given to the bitter of soul?”
Bitter circumstances have always prompted people to ask if their life has a purpose, and if so, what in the world it could be. I believe that horrible circumstances, such as those that Job experienced, are one way in which it is revealed to us not that we have no purpose but that our true purpose was something higher and grander than we ever imagined. We were right in assuming along with everybody else that we had a purpose, but we were wrong in assuming that that purpose could be exhaustively fulfilled in making money, having a good family, and living a long time in health and good cheer with friends who honored us and enjoyed our company. That won’t do it. The unexamined conviction that that must be the sum total of our purpose is unmasked as an illusion when tragedy strikes and takes it all away. Now where’s your purpose? Do you have a purpose that can withstand tragedy?
Interestingly enough, lesser purposes are also unmasked as an illusion when the opposite happens, and we get everything we ever wanted. You find this theme in the book of Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon had all the resources that a man of that era could possibly wish for. He was so ridiculously rich that according to 1 Kings 10:21, all his drinking cups were made of gold. None of his utensils were silver, because silver was thought to be of little value in his day.
Having everything at his disposal and leisure time galore, Solomon went on a fulfillment quest. He decided, I’m just going to have fun. I will fill myself with pleasure every day. He wrote, “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.” He gathered a harem of a thousand women. He said “I acquired male and female singers” – so he had live entertainment on demand. Naturally he turned to alcohol. He wrote, “I tried cheering my heart with wine.” He indulged a life of wine women and song, and figured that had to work. Who needs to worry about a purpose if you’re just happy all the time?
But he hated it, and concluded, “Laughter is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?”
At some point he knew he needed something meatier than pleasure, so he pursued a life of the mind. He wrote, “I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,..I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens… I said in my heart, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’” And it turned out that didn’t work either. He concluded, “With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” And as for his big pile of books he said, “The making of many books is endless, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
At one point he decided to pursue great projects. It is as though he figured, “I can’t just focus inward - the indulgence of my body with pleasure or the enrichment of my mind with knowledge. Let me focus outward.” He wrote, “I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.”
Did that do it for him? No. He concluded, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind. So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Solomon’s feeling of disillusionment despite having and accomplishing everything he ever wanted has been experienced by countless individuals whom most of us would envy. A famous example is New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. He is rich, good-looking, married to supermodel Gisele Bunchen, has won the Super Bowl 5 times, and is widely regarded as the greatest quarterback, indeed the greatest football player of all time. After his third Super Bowl victory he sat down for an interview with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. In a revealing moment Brady said, “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think that there is something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what it is – I have reached my goal, my dream, my life is…[his voice trails off]. Me, I think, God, it’s got to be more than this.” Kroft asked him, “What’s the answer?” And Brady said, “I wish I knew. I wish I knew.”
He’s not alone. Comedian and actor Jim Carey hit that same wall. In reflecting on his success, Carey said, “It looks great when you’ve got a cool car and you’ve got good nice clothes and you’ve done something that people admire, but it can never fulfill you, you can never be happy. You know what I mean? It’s not where happiness comes from… I think everybody should get rich and famous and get everything they dreamed so they can see that’s not the answer.”
It is striking to me that whether you are Job with nothing or Solomon, Tom Brady or Jim Carrey with everything, you can wind up in the exact same place with the same line of thought, the same conclusion, and ask the same set of questions. “What am I doing here? Why do I exist? What’s my purpose? Do I even have a purpose? Why do my all efforts to create a purpose come to naught when I see them dashed to smithereens or fulfilled beyond my wildest hopes?”
I believe, and the Christian faith teaches, that you cannot create your own purpose. It will never work. But you can discover what your true purpose is. That is, the purpose that is already there can be revealed to you, taught to you, and you can act upon it and live your life in accordance with it. The difference between creating your own purpose and discovering what your intrinsic purpose is might be helpfully illustrated with reference to the Greek notion of logos.
The concept of the logos in Greek philosophy predates Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. It goes back at least as far as Heraclitus in the 6th century BC. The word logos in Greek can simply mean “word.” It’s the word for “word.” Or more deeply, “the message” or “the communication,” what something or someone is trying to convey. The root word logos survives in our words biology, sociology, meteorology, etc. Biology, for example, is the word about or the study of living things. What are living things, what function do they fill, what purpose do they serve? – that’s “bio-logos” or biology.
In Greek thought, in order to appreciate, comprehend or use anything rightly, you needed to understand its particular logos, or as we might say, its rationale, its proper place, where it fits – or, crudely, its operating manual. Tim Keller has used the example of a space heater which I will borrow and expand upon.
What is a space heater? It is an electronic contraption, maybe the size of a breadbox, and you plug it in to heat up the space around it if your central heating is inadequate.
Now suppose you come across a space heater and you don’t know or care what its true logos is – there is no operating manual for it - but you are going to create a purpose for it. Now you have a nail that you want to drive into a 2-by-4 plank. Could you use a space heater to accomplish that? Well you could try. It would be pretty awkward to pick up the space heater and bring it down on the head of a nail. It might kind of work. But you’re more likely to bend the nail or miss it or damage the space heater, and you will be frustrated over the inadequate completion of the task. Your frustration is a signal that you have missed the logos of the space heater. Or suppose that you want to reach up to get something on a high shelf. Could you step on the space heater for that? That might work, if you’re light enough and the space heater is sturdy enough – but again, you could very well damage the space heater if you stand on it, or worse, fall and hurt yourself. Now suppose that you have a rough idea that a space heater is not a hammer, it’s not a step-stool – it is used for heating. So your bathwater is too cold, and you plug in your space heater and bring it in with you to the bathtub. Now you’ve just electrocuted yourself.
It each case, with the nail, the high shelf, and the cold bath, the results are unsatisfactory at best and lethal at worst because you have not acted in accordance with the space heater’s logos. You don’t create a purpose for the space heater – it already has one, which is to heat space. That’s its rationale, that is what it was designed for.
Now we are ready to frame our opening question this way. Do human beings come equipped with a logos, a place where we fit, a usefulness toward some end that is real rather than illusory, a true purpose that can be fulfilled rather than a make-believe temporary fix that we invent for ourselves and that always seems to get unmasked as unsatisfactory and Not Quite Right?
We do have a purpose, and it is to glorify God.
In saying that our purpose is to glorify God I am not saying anything new. This is not an earth-shattering innovation, though it may appear as such to someone who is hearing it for the first time. All I am doing is affirming as true what Christianity and indeed theistic faith has always maintained at its fundamental core. Your purpose is to glorify God. And that includes everything about you. 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” The first question of the Westminster Confession of Faith is, “What is the chief end of humanity?” Or as we might say, “Why are we here? What is our purpose?” And the answer given, correctly, is, “Our chief purpose is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding, it would be good to specify what we mean and don’t mean by “glorify” God. “Glory” in its most basic sense refers to shining, bright light shining. For example, in the Christmas account of Luke 2 we have the words, “The glory of the Lord shown round about them.” That is, the shepherds beheld something very bright.
When we glorify God, does that mean that we brighten him, that we shine a light on him to make him more luminescent than he already is? No. That would not be possible. God is already infinitely glorious. We cannot add to his glory or take away from it. An example of this principle may be found in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. First he declared his purpose: "We have come to dedicate a portion of that field.” But then he corrected himself and said, “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” That is, according to Lincoln, the field at Gettysburg was already as hallowed as it could ever be, and no words of his sprinkled on top of that could ever increase or decrease its glory.
But Lincoln could and did acknowledge the consecration, recognize the glory, and speak and act and conduct himself in accordance with it.
With regard to the inherent glory of God, we cannot increase it, but we can reflect it. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it, but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun.” Likewise, we cannot decrease God’s glory. Lewis wrote, “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls his cell.”
If by word, deed and conviction you refuse to glorify God, you will be like a mirror that buries itself in the mud and says, truthfully enough, “I don’t see the light of God’s glory.” But that will only be because you have buried your purpose along with your soul. Your purpose in life – whether you know it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, whether you fulfill it or not – your purpose in life is to reflect God’s glory back to him and toward all creation. You are a mirror designed to reflect the glory of God. That is your logos. By refusing to do that, you become – to draw from the other image I mentioned - like a space heater that never gets plugged in or that is put to some use alien to its nature. It will then be a matter of God’s severe mercy that you become frustrated in seeking to fulfill as ultimate any purpose other than the one for which you were made.
You were made to glorify God. Let me pile on the good news here. Glorifying God is something you can do at any moment, whether your dreams are fulfilled or they’ve all gone bust. Jesus said to his disciples in John 15:8: “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.” Please understand that “fruit” does not mean success. It means – as defined for us in Galatians 5:22-23 - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. That’s the fruit of the Spirit that glorifies God.
If you settle it in your mind that your one true purpose is to glorify God, and if it is not merely an acknowledgement of your lips but a truth known deeply in your bones, then you will be ready for every setback and disappointment that might otherwise cause you to question the point of your existence, and you also will be shielded against the deception that says that the fulfillment of lesser purposes will be sufficient for you.
The glad acknowledgment of one’s purpose to be that of glorifying of God is so all-encompassing that it includes not only all of life but even death. Even our death cannot elude the logos of glorifying God. When Jesus told Peter in John 21:18 that Peter himself would eventually be crucified, John says in the next verse that Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.
So, today, for me, as far as I can tell, it seems to me that the best angle at which I can hold up my mirror to reflect the glory of God will involve finishing this sermon, maybe answering a question or two, eating some lunch, and going home and taking a nap, delighting in God for the pleasure that gives me. Tomorrow I am to glorify God by working in a chemical production plant with diligence and goodwill and a contented spirit. And some day, perhaps soon, I am to glorify God by receiving the diagnosis of terminal cancer or some such lethal ailment with the words, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And, “See with what peace a Christian can die.”
On September 8, 2017, Jim Carrey made a surprise appearance at New York Fashion Week, and he gave a two-minute interview to E! News anchor Catt Sadler. You can watch it on YouTube. Carrey discoursed on the meaninglessness of Fashion Week and then on the meaninglessness of everything. He concluded with the words, “We don’t matter. We don’t matter. There’s the good news.”
That’s not good news. But more important than being bad news, it is false. There is good news, and it is real, and it involves the deepest truth of your existence. You do matter. You matter because God has designed you with the greatest purpose that any created entity can possible have, which is to glorify him.
Let us pray. Father in heaven, thank you for making us, and infusing us with a purpose greater than which none can be conceived for any created thing, which is to glorify you. Teach us to reflect your glory with courage, grace, goodwill, perseverance, and everlasting joy.
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